


The Killing Moon

by ChampagneYear



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-12
Updated: 2018-11-15
Packaged: 2019-08-22 13:03:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16598420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChampagneYear/pseuds/ChampagneYear
Summary: The shortest game of chess is completed in two moves. It relies on a blunder, one enacted typically by amateurs or those playing to lose. Kira isn’t playing to win. Victory isn’t wrapped up in a single moment; it’s a negotiation.





	1. Darts

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for checkin' this nonsense out! Rated E for coming chapters.

“So, Dukat was the literal antichrist. No surprise there, I suppose.” 

“Figurative.” Jake cocks an eyebrow over his shoulder at the doctor before launching his dart. It’s not a bad shot, but it’s not a good one either. “Which I suppose makes my dad the second coming.”

“Turning and turning….” Rising and casting his own dart in one fluid motion, Julian doesn’t bother to register the bull’s-eye. He instead turns and spots Ezri striding across the promenade: “Ah, and here comes the falcon herself.”

“What are you talking about?” Ezri sits with a slouch, weeks of empathetic labor settling into the ache in her shoulders, the caustic tempo behind her left eye; everyone lost someone in the war. She wants to consecrate the names, memorialize their stories, but they dribble out into a predictable narrative: “I loved someone. They fought…hard. They died.”

“Earth religion,” Kira remarks, staring into her Voodai. 

“How did you know that?” Julian asks Kira, even has he swivels his chair toward Ezri. Chess is a poor substitute for God, and the Ruy Lopez is beat for beat until it isn’t. Dukat is dead, and the Founders are sick, sick gods. And Benjamin. He looks at her eyes, and he thinks about Jadzia. He looks at her spots, and he thinks about Garak. 

“Common threads across cultures,” Kira remarks, sharp. She doesn’t look at Julian, and she doesn’t look at Ezri. She looks at her synthale. Her religion gives her tactical faith, just as the resistance gave her tactical ignorance.

“Colonel, are you – ” Julian begins. Formality is a poor substitute for –

but Jake sets down his empty glass: “I told Nog I’d meet him at Vic’s half an hour ago. Julian, you want in?”

Kira doesn’t see Jake wink at her. She doesn’t see Jake think – think, think, think about Benjamin, and try not to think, and think about what he would want if he was in Kira’s position, and do. 

But Ezri sees Jake wink, and Ezri isn’t thinking about chess, or Benjamin, or Jadzia, or Garak, or Kira – but she’s also thinking about all these things, so she says, “Good idea, Jake.”

“Then it’s settled - we’ll all go!” Julian is relieved at the opportunity not to think. 

“I can’t,” says Ezri, and she looks at Kira for the first time since sitting down. She feels Julian tense up beside her, and she’s not sure if it’s the decade of training or the nine lifetimes in which she’s fucked or been fucked by others that tell her that Julian’s confused, but within this lifetime, and within this moment, she empathizes –

but Julian speaks, and he says, confused, “Well, why not? You’ve only just arrived?”

“Got my own holosuite date with Kira,” she says, and she’s still looking at Kira, and Kira isn’t looking at her. But Ezri knows that words carve out universes.

“Oh?” Julian looks at Kira, and he doesn’t know if he knows. 

Kira responds beat for beat: “It’s an immersive meditative experience on one of the three unnamed moons of Bajor.”

“It doesn’t have a name?” Julian is still glancing between Ezri, and Kira, and Jake. 

“Not canonically.” And it’s a reason, but it’s not a good one.

Jake is still sitting on the edge of his seat, looking at Julian and knowing if he moves from place to place to place and writing in between, he won’t ever have to be still. The stillness. The dancing. 

So Julian says okay, and Julian asks if he can invite Garak, and Jake says yes.


	2. Holosuites

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A facsimile of the vacuum of space is the last thing anyone needs when floating in the real thing. It’s depressing.

Kira still isn’t looking at Ezri when she approaches the bar, and she knows that she should, but sometimes there’s power in the waiting. 

“Bloodwine?” asks Quark, “I can offer it to you at a very tempting premium?” 

“The political upheaval?” Kira is, for a moment, present.

“All the Klingons have left the station!” Quark is already reaching for the holosuite program, the one Kira’s been after nearly every night since the defeat of the Dominion. Frankly, he doesn’t see the appeal, and not just because it lacks the standard ingredients to simulated pleasure – he’s been around the quadrant enough to know that the humanoid imagination can supplement even the most mundane of circumstances – but rather because a facsimile of the vacuum of space is the last thing anyone needs when floating in the real thing. It’s depressing.

“We’ll take a bottle,” Kira says.

Quark pokes his head up from beneath the bar. He looks at Kira. He looks at Ezri. Supplemental pleasure. 

“We can take it into the holosuites, right Quark?” It’s the first time Ezri’s seen Kira smile all night.

“I won’t tell if you don’t.” He hands Kira the program.

Kira leads the way toward the holosuite. They don’t talk, but Ezri reaches out, links two or three fingers with Kira’s, and they stay that way.

Holosuites are funny, containing cosmos in close proximity. It’s the proximity that’s the killer.

Kira holds the program in her hand: metal, material, data, and escape. But behind her, she hears voices, and they’re not behind her eyelids. Jake’s leading the way, and behind him Julian and Garak are whispering close. Julian is holding a bottle of bloodwine.

“Quark’s Special,” Ezri nods. She doesn’t let go of Kira; she can’t.

“Political upheaval,” Julian agrees.

Once you’re in, and the program has started, you’re not where you were.


	3. The Moon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For a moment, they can stay on the moon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not sure about the physics of holosuites tbh.

“I can’t say that I don’t enjoy this habit,” Ezri remarks. They’re in the holosuite and they’re miles away from Vic’s even as they’re meters away from Vic’s. “But what would you think about taking an actual trip to the unnamed moon?”

“It’s a wretched moon,” Kira responds, sitting and staring at the digitally reproduced representation of Bajor in the distance, “Oscillating weather patterns, unpredictable winds.” A pause. “Wretched, but beautiful.”

Ezri sits next to her. It’s less of a moon, and more of a small orbiting body, which is exactly what a moon is, Ezri thinks, but somehow it’s different – something between barren and desolate. “Sounds familiar.”

“Rough day?” Kira asks. The words are too much and too little, and she’s tripping, falling, despite the deliberate maneuver.

“It’s just,” Ezri begins, and it’s sparring, even as it isn’t, “you do your job every day, and you love it. You started doing it because you loved it, and you keep doing it because you love it. Even when it’s hard. And one day, it starts to…”

“Hurt?”

“Yeah.”  
“I know what you mean,” she says. “I grew up fighting, and I loved it the way I love myself.” She doesn’t say that the fighting doesn’t stop when you stop loving it. She doesn’t say that the fighting doesn’t stop when you win.

“What happened?” Ezri asks, and it’s affective economics.

“I committed to it once I stopped loving it.”

I loved someone. They fought…hard. They died. Kira’s hair falls just below her ear. Her shoulders are hunched, and she’s looking at Ezri sideways, as if she could be talking to anyone, but she’s glad she isn’t. And suddenly affect is replaced by tactility, and Ezri wants to touch it all – her hair, the crease of her eye, the line on her mouth where a smile should be.

Kira opens the bloodwine: “Computer, glasses!” She pours it, delicate. For a moment, they can stay on the moon.

“I hate bloodwine,” Ezri says, after taking a long gulp.

Kira doesn’t have to say that Jadzia loved bloodwine.

Ezri doesn’t have to say that she’s not Jadzia. She drinks again, sanguine.

The shortest game of chess is completed in two moves. It relies on a blunder, one enacted typically by amateurs or those playing to lose. Kira isn’t playing to win. Victory isn’t wrapped up in a single moment; it’s a negotiation.

f3

She dips two fingers into her wine and places them on that sensitive spot behind Ezri’s ear, right at the top of her jaw. She applies calculated pressure, just for a moment, before snaking them downward, following the pattern to where the spots disappear, and leaving an inky red trail in her wake. “Do you now?”

e5

Ezri grabs her hand, feeling the remnants of the moisture sticky against her palm, sticky on her neck. Oscillating weather patterns, unpredictable winds. She brings the sticky to her lips, and then Kira’s fingers slip inside her mouth, and she’s licking the wine off them. “Yeah, it’s still terrible,” she replies, finished.

g4??

A blunder.

Kira sighs, but she’s smiling, and she doesn’t realize that she’s smiling: “Well, I’ll do you a favor then.” She pulls her hand away, picks up Ezri’s glass, and empties what’s left in a swallow.

Ezri reaches for the bottle, and she knows that she’s really reaching for Kira, and Kira moves to pull the bottle away, and she doesn’t know what she’s really pulling away from, but it’s a jerky operation and the bottle tips over, spilling its contents enviably.

Kira rights it quickly, but a dark stain remains, purple where the red wine has mingled with the blue dust. It emits a soft, mechanical buzz.

**Qh4**

 Fool’s Mate.

 “Quark won’t be happy about that,” she says, but it doesn’t matter because Ezri’s kissing her.

 Kira’s mouth tastes like bloodwine, and Ezri can finally detect the notes of sweetness beneath the brutal bitter. But the taste and the days of waiting, the hair on the back of her neck and the impossible breeze against her legs in the fuck end of space slam to the back of her brain, and she’s all hands in hair and teeth on skin.

 Melancholia is the anxiety of losing what has already been lost.


End file.
